


most famous knight of the world

by llassah



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-09
Updated: 2010-04-09
Packaged: 2017-10-08 19:30:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/llassah/pseuds/llassah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus has no need of the DADA job in Harry Potter's third year at Hogwarts. Instead, he lives in a cottage by a lake on the side of a mountain and tries to make sense of it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	most famous knight of the world

  
I want you to know  
one thing.

You know how this is:  
if I look  
at the crystal moon, at the red branch  
of the slow autumn at my window,  
if I touch  
near the fire  
the impalpabale ash  
or the wrinkled body of the log,  
everything carries me to you,  
as if everything that exists,  
aromas, light, metals,  
were little boats  
that sail  
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Pablo Neruda, "If You Forget Me"

_'Gawain,' he whispered as they sat by the fire. Gawain had a cut on the side of his face, blood crusted in his hair. His sword was still unsheathed, laid carelessly next to him. Lancelot wanted desperately to explain, to find the phrases which would make sense of his whirling thoughts, betrayal tangled in all the words he could find. 'I love her. I love them both. What would you have me do?'_

'Leave. You could leave. Should, even. Save all the maidens you want, but remove her from your heart. Oh, my Lancelot, you're tearing us apart.'

The next year, he goes to university, rents a house near the docks, drinks himself into a stupor every full moon and becomes adept at stage make up, the concealing of the bruises and cuts. He forgets that he has magic, and then eventually forgets to feel guilty about that. He gets letters by owl in the first three months, then they stop coming. He doesn't forget about the war, but surrounds himself with people who know nothing about it, who worry more about Horatio and Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet's opposing views of love. His dissertation's on Mallory's Arthur, and Merlin is the only link with the wizarding world he encounters. He has to put coins into the electric meter, do his own laundry, be subject to a system of laws that dictate parking and the disposal of rubbish. There are no night raids, or dead friends. It is utterly mundane, and wonderful for it.

  
During his degree he fucks three girls and two men. One girl stays the night, but usually it is in their digs, clumsy and awkward, with a stumble back to his own bed afterwards and the moon through the large window, his wand in a locked drawer and a book of Keats on the bedside table. After university he works stacking shelves for half a year, then travels, wizard-fashion. It is a grand tour of sorts, taking in France, Italy, Greece. He goes further afield, spends three months in the Arctic, renewing warming charms, three full moons on the frozen wasteland running as fast as his paws will carry him. Then the Sahara, and hot sand by day, cold by night, howling among the sun-whitened bones and the dunes. Then home. He is gone for five years.

  
He buys a cottage by a lake on the side of a hill in North Wales with the remains of his parents' money. It feels a little like a last chance. Llew, a taciturn Welsh wizard who farms sheep two valleys over, sells him the cottage outright. Llew watches him set down the wards which will restrict his movements in wolf form with little expression on his face . He is small with black hair and startlingly light eyes. There is something slightly Other about him, and the way he adds his own warding chants in a cracked, slightly warbling tenor makes Remus' hackles rise. He's fought alongside Llew, finds it hard to shake off the memory of the black cloaks and screams, and the blood- not his own- that streaked down the side of Llew's face, his laughter. They sit in the cottage kitchen after and talk idly about protection charms, the amulets Llew's found on the hilltops, the skulls, remains of bonfires, human bones and the rusted streaks of old blood. The old wizarding practices still have a hold on the rural wizarding communities, and it is a place that feels blessedly free of Ministry influence, but wild and dangerous, frightening in a different way.

There are two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, a study, a parlour and a kitchen downstairs. The walls are plastered and that is all, the roof leaks slightly, and damp has soaked into the whole house. It smells musty, cold, even with the September blue sky. He spends the first month repairing, sometimes in the Muggle way, sometimes taking shortcuts. He manages to bruise both thumbs, get a total of thirty two splinters, swear fifty three times and splash paint on his clothes too many times to tally. Three weeks in he realises he's been decorating the cottage like the first flat he bought with Sirius, and he sits on the doorstep and stares out at the lake, black and glassy. Then he drinks one bottle of wine and smokes ten cigarettes before falling asleep leaning against the doorframe, and wakes up with a crick in his neck and a stinking headache. He keeps decorating the cottage in the same way, and tells himself it's because he only has that colour paint, and besides, it's his favourite wallpaper.

Two months in, lying in the four poster bed with heavy blue curtains, listening to the wind outside, it hits him. 'Oh god, Sirius, you poor, stupid bastard,' he murmurs to himself, and misses him with a force that pins him, stiff and still on the bed- _werewolf, 29, male, good condition, cause of death unknown_\- and wonders how the fuck it went so dramatically wrong, how a charm so strong, so specific and effective as the Fidelius, could have been broken by something as commonplace as human weakness. Surely weakness, or error: it could equally have been Sirius' fear or his bravery that caused that final cataclysmic event. His bravery, probably. Sirius was never afraid.

Once he has started thinking about it, he finds himself unable to stop. His grief is not for the Potters or for Peter, but for Sirius, because he never thought, not even in his darkest hours, that Sirius would bow to any force. Sirius would never kiss the hem of a robe.

But he had. Unless he had swaggered up to the Dark Lord -- _Hello, old chap, got a bit of information for you, thought it might cheer you up a bit. About that Potter fellow you're so het up about_\-- he had knelt, and bowed, and worshipped. That was the worst part. That was a betrayal of Remus' helpless hero worship, an idolatry that no one noticed, except possibly Snape, with his cold rejection of any force greater than his own mind. The breaking of the Fidelius was the easiest betrayal of all.

Remus sits up, running his hand through his hair. It's blowing a gale outside, the windows rattling slightly, rain thudding against the glass. He pulls on a dressing gown, pads down to the kitchen. He experiences the fleeting desire to transform, to avoid human confusion in a shape which is innocent of conflict. Instead, he lights the lamps in the kitchen with a negligent wave of his hand, gets a mug down from the dresser and a lump of chocolate from the cupboard with a notice-me-not charm on it. He has rationed himself, and only eats it in times of need, werewolf metabolism or not.

The breaking of a vow, the telling of a secret- those rules that rely on honour are unenforceable and more powerful for it. The oath a wizard takes, the hiding of a secret- that's the start. The magic comes after. For Mallory it was something more potent than any grail, any wizard: the failures of the human spirit. It never used to be about Merlin, but the Pentecostal Oath, the failures of every knight, infidelity and the loss of honour, Mordred born of the King's sin. The force for the destruction of Camelot came from within it. Remus sits staring at the pitted and scratched wood of the tabletop. Taking a sip of tea, he summons a roll of parchment, a quill, his pot of ink. He'd got it all wrong. Utterly wrong.

It is morning when he stops writing, rubbing the redness from his eyes. He sighs, stretches and leaves the cottage, stands at the shore of the lake and lets his shabby dressing gown slip off his shoulders. The water is icy cold, matching the chill in the air. It smells of rain and ozone, wet grass and mist. He gasps and goes under, opening his eyes in the black water as he swims, sightless. No sun to warm the surface today. All is cold, and he is helpless, naked against it. Then numbness comes, and an odd sort of warmth. He swims out until he can distinguish rocks on the far shore, then swims back again, sometimes deep under the surface, sometimes on his back, starfish fashion, looking at the clouds. There is ink still on his fingers. After breakfast, he writes some more.

_Lancelot stood looking at her, smiling slightly. 'I am caught, balanced. The slightest breath of air will undo me.'_

'Then you will fall,' she said, turned and left the room, sunlight catching her hair and turning the edges of it bright red. A breeze stirred the dust motes and he closed his eyes, bowed his head.

Weeks continue in this fashion. He writes, sleeps, walks, eats, swims, not sure where Camelot ends and the Order begins. He feels possessed, driven. The full moon is the only punctuation to his writing, and he races around the lake, howls at the moon when it shows behind the clouds, runs his paws ragged on the scree of the mountainside. The wolf is searching, as it always does, for a stag, a rat and a dog. He wakes up in the mouth of a cave, naked and wounded, but oddly happy. Cold water from the lake bathes his wounds, then he sleeps, eats and writes.

_Galahad stood, tall and slender, apart from the group of knights, pure as the flame where they were weary and battleworn, hearts sore and heavy within them. Lancelot watched him as if he could somehow gain his purity of intention and spirit through study. 'I am a knight, too,' he whispered, but knew he had been weighed, measured, found wanting. He looked up and saw Gawain watching him with narrowed eyes, and sketched a salute._

An owl tries to get through his wards. He stands and watches it try to land, become confused, fly in a circle, then try again. It gives up after ten minutes, and he goes back to skimming stones. One skips ten times, big leaps, before it goes into rapid shuffling and sinks.

The next day there are three owls. Two days after, Albus Dumbledore walks up the mountain path as he is swimming. It's a surprise except it isn't really, not at all. Remus takes his time swimming to the shore. He'd felt his wards being broken in a precise and delicate way, and only Snape and Dumbledore have that approach to barriers. Both are capable of blasting his wards, both would choose not to. By the time he's in the shallows, Dumbledore's sitting on a rock, gazing out at the snow-capped mountains, the clear blue sky. He wears green robes, and seems to be a part of this landscape, this bleak, beautiful sanctuary. Remus summons a towel and clothes, dresses with his back to him then sits on a lower rock, the sun on his skin, looking up at the old man he respects above all wizards. 'I'm writing about Camelot, the Mallory version of the story,' he finds himself saying. Dumbledore's smile contains all the warmth of a June morning.

'Tell me all about it,' he says, and he tells and tells.

_He saw Gawain weaken as they fought, after those three hours where he fought with strength that would be too much for three men to withstand. At last he fell, and lay there on the grass, gasping for breath. 'End it, you bastard,' Gawain snarled, and he was tempted, fleetingly, the pain from his wounds making breath difficult, dizziness threatening to overwhelm him. 'Traitor. Coward.'_

Lancelot turns and leaves him lying there. He is an honourable man, still.

Two years and two seasons later, Dumbledore visits again. It is the height of summer. The book has been published and gained some success, if the press clippings his agent sends him are anything to go by, both in the Muggle and magical world. He is flying on his old Nimbus over the lake, looking at the red kite nest with a pair of binoculars. Dumbledore watches him as he glides down slowly, acutely aware of how tousled his hair is, of the shabbiness of his clothes, every smudge of dirt and stubble-shadow.

'It's Sirius, isn't it,' he says, calm, because it feels as if the past decade has been for him and him alone, as if every moment's thought is dedicated to the pursuit of understanding or the avoidance of the issue. Dumbledore has aged; his eyes have lost some of their twinkle and he stoops a little. He has felt little need in the past to shield Remus from unpalatable truths, and does not prevaricate.

'He escaped three days ago, swimming to the mainland. Harry has been informed- we're making efforts to secure Hogwarts- he doesn't know the full circumstances of Sirius Black's arrest. I think you are both in danger.'

Remus looks out at the hills and the lake, the way his cottage sits as if it has grown from the rock itself. 'I'm not afraid,' he says. They stand there and skim stones until the sun goes behind the clouds, then sit in Remus' kitchen, drink tea and talk about Harry, who has a seemingly infinite capacity for both love and getting into trouble. Dumbledore offers him a job once more, and he refuses- despite the legislation rendering him unemployable, writing is a comfortable source of income. Remus sleeps badly, basilisks and wolves fighting in his dreams. He realises at about two in the morning that Dumbledore is waiting for another series of battles, hasn't relaxed his guard at all. It has never been peacetime.

He dusts through the house, airing mattresses, retouching paintwork, beating carpets, calming his mind through physical exertion. He is adept at avoidance—this is, surely, more postponement. Waiting, perhaps. He takes one of the kitchen chairs outside and watches the sun set, smoking the last three cigarettes in the packet. He will need to shop for provisions, soon. All he can think is that he'll need more firewhiskey in a few days. He writes to Dumbledore asking him to alert him if Sirius is found, to enquire after Harry, then burns the letter, hovering it as the flames lick out from the middle of the paper. Another scrap of paper, with 'find me' written on it, he makes into a paper aeroplane and throws, hoping he's remembered the charms right. He falls asleep on the chair, wakes up with the sunrise and a chill that's sunk deep into his bones, a quill in his hand.

He throws himself into the lake on the full moon, chasing the white shimmers of moonlight that forms a strip up the middle, the stars pinpricks in the dark shining surface. There are some cycles where the wolf simply chases the moon, howls up a devotion to her, huge, cold and unfeeling among the constellations that measure the lives of the astrologers as the moon measures and guides his. He plays in the shallows, paws slipping on the rocks, pursuing the fishes that are too fast to catch, over and over again. It is always the moon the wolf's attention returns to, and he sits and drips and shivers a little until morning, watching her face.

The dog comes as the scent of autumn bonfires rises up the mountain, malnourished, fur matted. Remus points to the lake. 'You're far too filthy to come in,' he says, puts the leftovers of pasta on a plate, and waits in the doorway, watching the dog wash. He puts the bowl down on the shore, and gets a comb. It takes half an hour for the snarls and tangles to come out of his fur, and the dog yelps a little, looks at him with reproachful eyes. 'Oh, stop fussing,' he says, half amused, then gets him some more food. The dog doesn't wait to be invited in, simply follows, but growls when Remus tries to close the front door. 'There'll be a draught,' he tells him, but props it open with a brick anyway, and sits at the kitchen table, looking at the dog. The dog looks back. When he goes to make a cup of tea, he makes another and puts it in a bowl, setting it down by his feet. When the dog drinks the tea with evident enjoyment, he feels a tug of something like joy. 'You and I have much to discuss.' The dog looks up at him, hackles a little raised, and he shakes his head, puts one and a half spoonfuls of sugar in the bowl and stirs it, skritching behind the dog's ear.

It takes a week for the dog to transform, a week of walking with him up the mountain and round the lake, keeping up a steady flow of words. He hasn't talked to anyone for any period of time for years, and he finds himself describing a scorpion he encountered in the Sahara, the merpeople in Venice who tried to keep him as a pet, the isolation of the tundra. The dog sleeps at the foot of his bed, and insists he leaves the doors and windows open. He wears thick woollen socks to bed for all of that week. Then, one morning, Sirius is there, naked, with half cut hair and a pair of kitchen scissors and he doesn't know what to say, just sits up in bed and stares.

'Trousers?' Sirius asks in a voice which is hoarse and cracked, so different from the lazy drawl he used to cultivate.

'In the wardrobe, but you'll need a belt, and oh goodness what are you doing to your hair?'

Sirius just looks at him. 'That's the first thing you can think of to say?'

Remus shrugs, gets out of bed and takes the scissors out of his hand. 'Sit down,' he says and tidies Sirius' hair up as much as he can, then sweeps up the clippings with a quick charm, noting how Sirius flinches at the spell. Then he gives him underpants, and the clothes he took from their flat, walks downstairs, sits at the kitchen table and slumps forward until his forehead is against the wood. He stays like that as Sirius comes downstairs, clean and dressed, as he eats like a starving man. Sirius leaves the room, he hears the front door opening and closing, and he can't quite summon the energy to get up and confront any of this. He loses track of time, just concentrates on his breathing, on a heartbeat that somehow remains steady.

'Have you finished yet?' Sirius asks, and Remus sits up, looks at him. He is gaunt, so gaunt, with lines etched onto his face, streaks of grey through his hair.

'For the moment, yes. I reserve the right to panic blindly a bit more soon.'

He laughs the same, a short bark. 'As you wish.'

'I could be arrested for this, you know. Aiding and abetting. Withholding important information- you got out as a dog, didn't you. Nice little loophole, and I didn't even tell them and God, Sirius, I'm too much of a coward to hate you properly, even after everything.'

'Why can't you hate me?'

'Oh, I've tried. My only visitor here's Dumbledore- I could hide you here, you know. The wards are strong enough, and I'm just a harmless, heartbroken eccentric who had an obscure role in the last War and now writes children's books about knights and dragons. It even has a lake for swimming in, and I brought your records here, that damn Benny Goodman LP, some of your clothes, the wind up gramophone, your broom...' He's pacing, now, Sirius watching him warily. 'I couldn't understand how it had happened, and just sort of carried on as if it hadn't. I'm an idiot.'

'Ronald Weasley has a rat with a missing finger on its right paw,' Sirius says quietly, leaning against the doorframe.

_A shaft of sunlight shone into the tomb, and Lancelot he knelt there weeping for his friend and adversary, whom he would not kill but could not please. He kept the letter Gawain wrote in his last hours by his heart, and did not let their words leave his mind. 'I who am the greatest knight,' he whispered into the stillness of the tomb. The words tasted like ash._

He can trace every one of Sirius' ribs, and the shape of him as they lie together is a mix of familiar and unfamiliar proportions. They relearn each other with kisses and questing hands, sweeping over raised scars, the dips and hollows, soft skin to rough, every year mapped out, lost years, the times they'll never talk about. Sirius is still ticklish, and still goes limp when Remus grips the back of his neck. In time, he'll have gained weight; in time, perhaps, he'll sleep with the window closed, and the nightmares will stop, and Remus won't worry every time they leave the safety of the mountain. For a few perfect moments, though, this is all there is, Sirius is all that exists and everything that led up to it is nothing, and nothing will happen after. Remus closes his eyes and falls, and knows that Sirius falls with him. Then they sleep.

  
**Notes:**

Thomas Mallory's Morte d'Arthur is a fifteenth century version of the Arthurian legend, and the extracts of Remus' novel are alluding to events within the text. I apologise to purists and scholars. Thank you very much to my betas.


End file.
